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• Denali CTP3 - Semantic Search 2 (Lots of documents)

  - by sqlartist

  Hi again, I thought I would improve on the previous post by actually putting a decent about of content into the Filetable - this time I used the opensource DMOZ Health document repository which contains 5,880 files inside 220 folders. The files are all html and are pretty small in size. The entire document collection is about 120Mb unzipped and 30Mb zipped. If any one is interested in testing this collection drop me a note and I will upload the dmoz_health repository archive to Skydrive. This time...(read more)

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• Has test driven development (TDD) actually benefited a real world project?

  - by James

  I am not new to coding. I have been coding (seriously) for over 15 years now. I have always had some testing for my code. However, over the last few months I have been learning test driven design/development (TDD) using Ruby on Rails. So far, I'm not seeing the benefit. I see some benefit to writing tests for some things, but very few. And while I like the idea of writing the test first, I find I spend substantially more time trying to debug my tests to get them to say what I really mean than I do debugging actual code. This is probably because the test code is often substantially more complicated than the code it tests. I hope this is just inexperience with the available tools (RSpec in this case). I must say though, at this point, the level of frustration mixed with the disappointing lack of performance is beyond unacceptable. So far, the only value I'm seeing from TDD is a growing library of RSpec files that serve as templates for other projects/files. Which is not much more useful, maybe less useful, than the actual project code files. In reading the available literature, I notice that TDD seems to be a massive time sink up front, but pays off in the end. I'm just wondering, are there any real world examples? Does this massive frustration ever pay off in the real world? I really hope I did not miss this question somewhere else on here. I searched, but all the questions/answers are several years old at this point. It was a rare occasion when I found a developer who would say anything bad about TDD, which is why I have spent as much time on this as I have. However, I noticed that nobody seems to point to specific real-world examples. I did read one answer that said the guy debugging the code in 2011 would thank you for have a complete unit testing suite (I think that comment was made in 2008). So, I'm just wondering, after all these years, do we finally have any examples showing the payoff is real? Has anybody actually inherited or gone back to code that was designed/developed with TDD and has a complete set of unit tests and actually felt a payoff? Or did you find that you were spending so much time trying to figure out what the test was testing (and why it was important) that you just tossed out the whole mess and dug into the code?

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• Will we see a trend of stereoscopic 3D games coming up in the near future?

  - by Vish

  I've noticed that the trend of movies is diving into the world of movies with 3-dimensional camera.For me it provoked a thought as if it was the same feeling people got when they saw a colour movie for the first time, like in the transition from black and white to colour it is a whole new experience. For the first time we are experiencing the Z(depth) factor and I really mean when I said "experiencing". So my question is or maybe if not a question, but Is there a possibility of a genre of 3d camera games upcoming?

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• ShowPlan Operator of the Week - Merge Join

  Did you ever wonder how and why your indexes affect the performances of joins? Once you've read Fabiano Amorim's unforgettable explanation, you'll learn to love the MERGE operator, and plan your indexes so as to allow the Query Optimiser to use it. Free trial of SQL Backup™“SQL Backup was able to cut down my backup time significantly AND achieved a 90% compression at the same time!” Joe Cheng. Download a free trial now.

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• How to cleanly add after-the-fact commits from the same feature into git tree

  - by Dennis

  I am one of two developers on a system. I make most of the commits at this time period. My current git workflow is as such: there is master branch only (no develop/release) I make a new branch when I want to do a feature, do lots of commits, and then when I'm done, I merge that branch back into master, and usually push it to remote. ...except, I am usually not done. I often come back to alter one thing or another and every time I think it is done, but it can be 3-4 commits before I am really done and move onto something else. Problem The problem I have now is that .. my feature branch tree is merged and pushed into master and remote master, and then I realize that I am not really done with that feature, as in I have finishing touches I want to add, where finishing touches may be cosmetic only, or may be significant, but they still belong to that one feature I just worked on. What I do now Currently, when I have extra after-the-fact commits like this, I solve this problem by rolling back my merge, and re-merging my feature branch into master with my new commits, and I do that so that git tree looks clean. One clean feature branch branched out of master and merged back into it. I then push --force my changes to origin, since my origin doesn't see much traffic at the moment, so I can almost count that things will be safe, or I can even talk to other dev if I have to coordinate. But I know it is not a good way to do this in general, as it rewrites what others may have already pulled, causing potential issues. And it did happen even with my dev, where git had to do an extra weird merge when our trees diverged. Other ways to solve this which I deem to be not so great Next best way is to just make those extra commits to the master branch directly, be it fast-forward merge, or not. It doesn't make the tree look as pretty as in my current way I'm solving this, but then it's not rewriting history. Yet another way is to wait. Maybe wait 24 hours and not push things to origin. That way I can rewrite things as I see fit. The con of this approach is time wasted waiting, when people may be waiting for a fix now. Yet another way is to make a "new" feature branch every time I realize I need to fix something extra. I may end up with things like feature-branch feature-branch-html-fix, feature-branch-checkbox-fix, and so on, kind of polluting the git tree somewhat. Is there a way to manage what I am trying to do without the drawbacks I described? I'm going for clean-looking history here, but maybe I need to drop this goal, if technically it is not a possibility.

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• GDD-BR 2010 [1G] Android: Building High-Performance Applications

  GDD-BR 2010 [1G] Android: Building High-Performance Applications Speaker: Tim Bray Track: Android Time: G [16:30 - 17:15] Room: 1 Level: 151 Build Android applications that are smooth, fast, responsive, and a pleasure to use. Also, learn about the tools and techniques we use to track down and fix performance problems. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 20 0 ratings Time: 33:34 More in Science & Technology

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• What is the proper SEO way to add and remove links to our site and sitemap?

  - by ElHaix

  As content fluctuates on our site, we will obviously add the titles to the new pages to our sitemap, and link list for search engine indexing. Through time, certain links will become less relevant, and would like to know how to avoid them being crawled. The links themselves may not be removed - but we don't want to dilute the link list with less relevant links as time passes. I'm guessing the status code of the page would change - to what? Should they also removed from the sitemap?

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• Consolidation in a Database Cloud

  - by B R Clouse

  Consolidation of multiple databases onto a shared infrastructure is the next step after Standardization.  The potential consolidation density is a function of the extent to which the infrastructure is shared.  The three models provide increasing degrees of sharing: Server: each database is deployed in a dedicated VM. Hardware is shared, but most of the software infrastructure is not. Standardization is often applied incompletely since operating environments can be moved as-is onto the shared platform. The potential for VM sprawl is an additional downside. Database: multiple database instances are deployed on a shared software / hardware infrastructure. This model is very efficient and easily implemented with the features in the Oracle Database and supporting products. Many customers have moved to this model and achieved significant, measurable benefits. Schema: multiple schemas are deployed within a single database instance. The most efficient model, it places constraints on the environment. Usually this model will be implemented only by customers deploying their own applications.  (Note that a single deployment can combine Database and Schema consolidations.) Customer value: lower costs, better system utilization In this phase of the maturity model, under-utilized hardware can be used to host more workloads, or retired and those workloads migrated to consolidation platforms. Customers benefit from higher utilization of the hardware resources, resulting in reduced data center floor space, and lower power and cooling costs. And, the OpEx savings from Standardization are multiplied, since there are fewer physical components (both hardware and software) to manage. Customer value: higher productivity The OpEx benefits from Standardization are compounded since not only are there fewer types of things to manage, now there are fewer entities to manage. In this phase, customers discover that their IT staff has time to move away from "day-to-day" tasks and start investing in higher value activities. Database users benefit from consolidating onto shared infrastructures by relieving themselves of the requirement to maintain their own dedicated servers. Also, if the shared infrastructure offers capabilities such as High Availability / Disaster Recovery, which are often beyond the budget and skillset of a standalone database environment, then moving to the consolidation platform can provide access to those capabilities, resulting in less downtime. Capabilities / Characteristics In this phase, customers will typically deploy fixed-size clusters and consolidate on a cluster until that cluster is deemed "full," at which point a new cluster is built. Customers will define one or a few cluster architectures that are used wherever possible; occasionally there may be deployments which must be handled as exceptions. The "full" policy may be based on number of databases deployed on the cluster, or observed peak workload, etc. IT will own the provisioning of new databases on a cluster, making the decision of when and where to place new workloads. Resources may be managed dynamically, e.g., as a priority workload increases, it may be given more CPU and memory to handle the spike. Users will be charged at a fixed, relatively coarse level; or in some cases, no charging will be applied. Activities / Tasks Oracle offers several tools to plan a successful consolidation. Real Application Testing (RAT) has a feature to help plan and validate database consolidations. Enterprise Manager 12c's Cloud Management Pack for Database includes a planning module. Looking ahead, customers should start planning for the Services phase by defining the Service Catalog that will be made available for database services.

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• How do I change the date format in Gnome 3 shell?

  - by James Haigh

  I want to change the date/time format on the top panel to a format close to RFC 3339 / ISO 8601, like one of these: %F %T ? 2013-06-24 16:13:00 %F %a %T ? 2013-06-24 Mon 16:13:00 %A %F %T ? Monday 2013-06-24 16:13:00 I know Unity has a preference somewhere hidden away in dconf, this is how I did it in Unity, but I can't find such a preference for Gnome 3 shell. Preferably, I'd also like to set one of these as my system-wide date/time locale preference.

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• Sounds Good...

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction This post is the twenty-ninth part of a ramble-rant about the software business. The current posts in this series are: Goodwill, Negative and Positive Visions, Quests, Missions Right, Wrong, and Style Follow Me Balance, Part 1 Balance, Part 2 Definition of a Great Team The 15-Minute Meeting Metaproblems: Drama The Right Question Software is Organic, Part 1 Metaproblem: Terror I Don't Work On My Car A Turning Point Human Doings Everything Changes Getting It Right The First Time One-Time...(read more)

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• On a BPM Mission with Process Accelerators. Part 1: BPM as an ATV

  - by Cesare Rotundo

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Part 1: BPM as an ATV It’s always exciting to talk to customers that are in the middle of a BPM transformational journey. Their thirst for new processes to improve with BPM makes them explorers in a landscape of opportunities. They have discovered that with BPM the can “go places” they couldn’t reach before. In a way, learning how to generate value with BPM is like adopting a new mean of transportation. Apps are like regular cars: very efficient, but to be used on paved roads: the road/process has been traced, and there are fixed paths to follow to get from “opportunity to quote” or from “quote to cash”. Getting off the road is risky, and laying down new asphalt is slow and expensive. Custom development is like running: you can go virtually anywhere, following any path you like, yet it’s slow, and a lot of sweat. BPM allows you to go “off the beaten path” laid out by packaged apps, yet make fast progress compared to custom development. BPM is therefore more like an All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV): less efficient than a car, but much faster than running, with a powerful enough engine that can get you places. The similarities between BPM and ATVs don’t stop here: you must learn to ride it even if you already know how to drive a car; you can reach places but figuring out the path to your destination is harder. Ultimately, with BPM as with an ATV, you reach places that you thought you could never reach, and you discover new destinations that provide great benefit to you … and that you didn’t even know existed! That’s where the sense of accomplishment that we heard from our BPM customers comes from, as well as the desire to share their experience, or even, as in the case of a County, the willingness to contribute their BPM solutions to help other agencies that face the same challenges. The question we wanted to answer is how can we teach organizations to drive ATV/BPM, thus leading them to deeper success with BPM, while increasing their awareness of the potential for reaching new targets, and finally equip them with the right tools. Like with ATVs, getting from point A to point B is more of a work of art than cruising on the highway by car. There is a lot we can do: after all many sought after destinations are common: someone else has been on the same path before. If only you could learn from their experience …

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• Why doesn't file detect the mime-type of mp3 properly?

  - by Grumbel

  Something odd I recently encountered, running file --mime-type on a collection of MP3 gets the mime-time wrong a third of the time: $ for i in */*.mp3; do cat "$i"| file --mime-type -; done | sort | uniq -c 140 /dev/stdin: application/octet-stream 309 /dev/stdin: audio/mpeg There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason, as even MP3s from the same source, will sometimes fail and sometimes not. Bug, feature or anything obvious I am missing here?

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• Hangouts API v1.1 Walkthrough

  Hangouts API v1.1 Walkthrough Introduction to 3 new features in v1.1 of the Hangouts API. This release introduces the ability for your app to respond to face movements in real time. It also provides a new overlay positioned relative to the video feed, new low-latency messages, Hangouts on Air support, the ability to enter any OAuth scope, and a few other miscellaneous features. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 4425 0 ratings Time: 01:14 More in Science & Technology

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• Crash During Update Deleted ALL panels; can't open terminal; can't see icons

  - by Evan

  So I was upgrading Ubuntu from 11.10 to 12.04 in the terminal after recovering my system from a previous crash, and then I go through a power outage during the second time trying to update. NOW, my screen is white, only the time shows up in the top right corner, no icons show up, no apps show up, AND terminal is NOT opening. I can still use the internet somehow, and ctrl + alt + F2 opens what I think is a back-up terminal? NEED HELP to recover what is lost.

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• Working with SQL Server Profiler Trace Files

  In a previous tip we looked at the steps to Create a Trace Template in Profiler. In this tip we will look at a few more tips such as creating a trace template from an existing trace file and saving a trace file to a SQL Server table. Free trial of SQL Backup™“SQL Backup was able to cut down my backup time significantly AND achieved a 90% compression at the same time!” Joe Cheng. Download a free trial now.

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• How to end a relationship with a client without pissing them off?

  - by thesam18888

  Here's my situation: I'm a freelancing student and I was working on a software project for a client over the summer holidays of 2010. At the time I completed the application, tested it on my machine, delivered it to the client and went back to University. However the client is not completely satisfied with the product and apparently has found a couple of bugs with it. Ever since I went back to Uni, they have been chasing me up and asking me to spend some time to fix the bugs. I have explained that this is simply not possible as I am extremely busy with my Uni work and cannot afford to spare my time for anything else. The client is getting increasingly pissed off and have been chasing me by calling during lectures at evenings and even asking me if I could go over to their place over the weekend to talk about this. This is in turn pissing me off as well because they're essentially asking me to give up my education so that I could help them out by fixing bugs. I go to Uni 5 days a week, 9-6 and feel it is unreasonable for them to call me during evenings and to ask me to work over weekends etc. I would like to end my relationship with this client but would like to do it amicably without pissing them off. How can I do this? I really wish they would just find someone else but I was charging them piss-poor rates so I think they don't want to go to anyone else because they would have to pay more. EDIT The application does not seem to work perfectly on their machine. I had tested it extensively on my machine and it seemed to work fine. I am not sure what exactly is causing it to not work. I was paid a very low amount and it was on an hourly basis. e.g. I would send an invoice saying I worked on this for x amount of hours and they would pay me for it. Apart from the work itself, I have not charged them for all the time spent sending e-mails back and forth, phone calls, visits to their place etc. I would really like to end all my dealings with this client right away.

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• How to be successfull at BDD Specifications Workshops?

  - by sigo

  Today we tried to introduce BDD in our software development process by having a specification workshop. For this workshop we had 2 developers, 1 tester and 1 business analyst. The workshop lasted 1h30 and by the end of it we managed to figure out some BDD scenarios for our new feature. We tried to focus on finding the scenarios that we could miss, and the difficult ones. At the end of the workshop some people were actually unhappy with the workshop. One developer felt he wasted his time as he was used to be given out the scenarios directly by the business analyst and review them with her. The business analyst didn't feel confident with our scenario coverage (Had a feeling that we could have missed out other important stuff) but more importantly felt that this workshop was also a waste of time as she could have figured out all these scenarios by herself and in a shorter period of time. So my question is how that kind of workshop can actually work. In the theory, given you have a new feature to develop, you put the tree 'amigos' (dev/tester/ba) in the same room so that they can collaborate together on writing the differents requirements for the new feature using examples. I can see all the benefits from that. Specially in term of knowledge sharing and common product/end goal/done vision. But in practice, we still think it is more cost effective to first have a BA to work on his own on the examples and only then to have the scenarios to be reviewed/reworked by the 3 'amigos'. By having the BA to work on his own, we actually feel more confident that we are less going to miss out stuff + we still get to review the scenarios afterward to double check. We don't think than simple brainstorming/deliberate discovery is actually enought to seriously cover all the requirement for a feature. The business analyst is actually the best person for that kind of stuff. The thing we just do is to review what she wrote and see if then we have a common understanding (which could then lead to rewrite some of her scenarios or add new ones she could have missed). This workshop lasted 1h30, and by the end of it, we didn't feel confident enought about wha we did...sure we could have spent more time on it but honestly most people get exhausted after 1h30 of brainstorming. So how can you get that to work effectively in practice ?

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• Oredev 2012: Summary and source code

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This week, I had the pleasure to be invited to talk at Oredev, a really cool conference taking place in Malmo, Sweden. The whole event is awesome, including a very special dinner on Monday including sauna and swimming in a 6 degrees cold Baltic sea, and a reception with dinner at the town hall, including the mayor himself. Considering Malmo is a town of 300'000 inhabitants, it is a pretty nice occasion and the historical building itself is really worth seeing. For those interested, I placed my pictures on my Flickr account. I had a workshop on Tuesday morning about Windows 8 development with XAML/C#, and then a session on Wednesday about MVVM in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8, of course using MVVM Light. I was very nervous because I reworked some of my demos as recently as this morning, in the wake of the Build conference last week and the release of both the Windows Phone SDK and MVVM Light V4.1. Everything went well however, and if I judge by the people I talked t after the talk, and Twitter, everything went pretty well. Before my talk on Tuesday, I had the pleasure to see a talk by Iris Classon (@irisclasson) on the challenges of being a "n00b" and a woman in software development. I especially appreciated her research and conclusions on the lack of women I our industry, a topic that is dear to my heart (because I want the best possible future for my two daughters, and also because I really enjoy working with women on projects, and getting a different insight on the art of software development. I really want to thank the excellent organization committee for their hard work and their fantastic welcome to Malmo. In particular Emily Holweck did a wonderful job and was super helpful throughout the preparation and the conference itself. I made a few pictures during my stay, all with the new Nokia Lumia 920, and hope you will enjoy them too. The source code and the slides… The source code is available for download from Skydrive. You will find the following: Windows 8 workshop slides. MVVM Applied slides Source code package with Win8Demo: The demo I built during the 4 hours workshop, with some light MVVM, web services (JSON), GridView, Design time data (Blend / Visual Studio designer), Bing maps integration, location sensor, Search pane integration. SemanticZoomSample: a sample I put together to demonstrate the SemanticZoom control, with two GridViews and of course full design time data for Blend work. Due to time constraints, I was not able to show this demo during the workshop, but I publish it anyway, hoping it will be useful to someone. PictureUploader: The demo I built during my 50 minutes session about MVVM Applied in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. Code sharing, design time data, MVVM Light are used in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 apps. And in video… You can also see the video of my MVVM talk thanks to the good services of the Oredev team! MVVM Applied in Windows Phone and Windows 8 from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• My First 5K, the recap.

  - by Chris Williams

  It was a nice day to be outside (and trust me, those aren't words you'll hear from me often.) I got to the site around 7:45, hit the pre-reg table and got my number along with a goody bag full of coupons for racing gear, a water bottle and a tshirt. Oh and a map. Stashed all that stuff in the jeep, emptied my pockets of everything but my iPhone and my jeep key, and proceeded to walk around for a bit as people started showing up and signing in. It was fairly breezy, and there was definitely a storm coming... but it was anyone's guess on when it would actually arrive. It was interesting to see everyone who was participating. If I had to guess, I would say the event was 60-70% women, with a pretty broad distribution of age... as young as 13 to well over 60 (in both genders.) I don't know exactly how many folks were there, but it was well over 300. Eventually it was time to kick things off, and everyone made their way to the start line. All of the 5k and 10k runners were mixed together, starting at the same time. All the walkers and the people with strollers or dogs were in the back. It was pretty chaotic at first, once things started, but it thinned out fairly quickly. The 10k people and the hardcore runners sped ahead of everyone else and the walkers gradually lagged behind. The 5K course was pretty nice, winding around a lake down in Eden Prairie. The 10K course overlapped most of ours, but branched off a couple times too. I didn't run the whole time, but I started the race running and I ended it running, and did a mix of walking and running along the way. I met my goals, which were a) don't ever stop and b) don't be last. The weather managed to hold out for the entire race. It never got too hot, there was a nice breeze and it was mostly overcast. Pretty much perfect in my book. About 20-30 minutes after I left, the rain came down pretty hard. I had a good time, and will most likely do more of them. We'll see.

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• How to Clear Metro Application Notifications at Log Off in Windows 8

  - by Taylor Gibb

  Sometimes in Windows 8 you may find your application notifications getting stuck from time to time, the fix to this problem is to clear the notification cache at log off, here’s how. Why Enabling “Do Not Track” Doesn’t Stop You From Being Tracked HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It? How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference

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• High traffic chat - how to check if there is new message and show it for all users

  - by user2633999

  I already had question about this but obviously it was not accepted very well, apparently too long when it's actually more information so you could have given me better answer. Ok, I will be much clearer now. Best possible logic to develop scalable chat in terms of stability, storing/reading messages on chat, updating chat on new message for all users etc.? I have most of this developed, the logic I think I miss is -- check if there is new message and show it for all users. I have this implemented but it crashes the site due to its traffic of 300k-400k people, so that's my main question. The chat is PHP based and uses Pusher (www.pusher.com) for instant messaging but it lacks what I need because it's more like a websocket. I'm using hardcoded files to keep messages (want to avoid database as much as possible). It's a no extension type of file, I'm sure you know. I'm getting crash with $fp = fopen(..., "w"); // pretend ... is the path and filename fwrite($fp, $msg); //hardcode the message fclose($fp); where $msg is the message itself. I'm having 1 file per message. I show last 150 messages = 150 file accesses and reads, yeah it's too much I guess. I have better logic now which I'm pursuing and that is 1 file with last 50-100 messages at all time. Sure it should be much better. How does it crash, that's the trickiest part because everything seems ordinary, believe me it is difficult to determine what exactly crashes the site, but in like 5 minutes when I try to open the site it's gone, then I put the old content without chat and is back online again. I'm having jquery post every 1 second to check if there is new message. I'm using timestamp in a special file where I keep the time last message was sent and if ((time() - time in file) <= 2) = reload last 150 messages including the last one. Too much input/output, write/read or however to say it I think is what crashes the site.

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• Boies Calls For Cheaper Trials

  <b>LegalPad:</b> "Boies said attorneys should pare cases down to their essentials early on, and that limits on discovery and on the time allowed before a case goes to trial would save time and money for the justice system."

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• What are the methods to estimate source code value?

  - by Antoine

  I've been working on some project on my free time for the past few months. Recently I've been approached by friends to build a startup, and this source code would be very valueable to us. As a co-founder, this code could count for something in the company's capital, and be exchanged for shares. But how can you estimate its value? Do you just multiply industry-standard wqges by the time I spent on it, or are there other methods?

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• How far should an entity take care of its properties values by itself?

  - by Kharlos Dominguez

  Let's consider the following example of a class, which is an entity that I'm using through Entity Framework. - InvoiceHeader - BilledAmount (property, decimal) - PaidAmount (property, decimal) - Balance (property, decimal) I'm trying to find the best approach to keep Balance updated, based on the values of the two other properties (BilledAmount and PaidAmount). I'm torn between two practices here: Updating the balance amount every time BilledAmount and PaidAmount are updated (through their setters) Having a UpdateBalance() method that the callers would run on the object when appropriate. I am aware that I can just calculate the Balance in its getter. However, it isn't really possible because this is an entity field that needs to be saved back to the database, where it has an actual column, and where the calculated amount should be persisted to. My other worry about the automatically updating approach is that the calculated values might be a little bit different from what was originally saved to the database, due to rounding values (an older version of the software, was using floats, but now decimals). So, loading, let's say 2000 entities from the database could change their status and make the ORM believe that they have changed and be persisted back to the database the next time the SaveChanges() method is called on the context. It would trigger a mass of updates that I am not really interested in, or could cause problems, if the calculation methods changed (the entities fetched would lose their old values to be replaced by freshly recalculated ones, simply by being loaded). Then, let's take the example even further. Each invoice has some related invoice details, which also have BilledAmount, PaidAmount and Balance (I'm simplifying my actual business case for the sake of the example, so let's assume the customer can pay each item of the invoice separately rather than as a whole). If we consider the entity should take care of itself, any change of the child details should cause the Invoice totals to change as well. In a fully automated approach, a simple implementation would be looping through each detail of the invoice to recalculate the header totals, every time one the property changes. It probably would be fine for just a record, but if a lot of entities were fetched at once, it could create a significant overhead, as it would perform this process every time a new invoice detail record is fetched. Possibly worse, if the details are not already loaded, it could cause the ORM to lazy-load them, just to recalculate the balances. So far, I went with the Update() method-way, mainly for the reasons I explained above, but I wonder if it was right. I'm noticing I have to keep calling these methods quite often and at different places in my code and it is potential source of bugs. It also has a detrimental effect on data-binding because when the properties of the detail or header changes, the other properties are left out of date and the method has no way to be called. What is the recommended approach in this case?

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• Will we see a trend of "3d" games coming up in the near future?

  - by Vish

  I've noticed that the trend of movies is diving into the world of movies with 3-dimensional camera.For me it provoked a thought as if it was the same feeling people got when they saw a colour movie for the first time, like in the transition from black and white to colour it is a whole new experience. For the first time we are experiencing the Z(depth) factor and I really mean when I said "experiencing". So my question is or maybe if not a question, but Is there a possibility of a genre of 3d camera games upcoming?

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